In law, litigation discovery is the pre-trial phase in a lawsuit in which each party can request and/or compel the production of documents and other evidence from other parties. Often, litigation discovery is a process that includes manually gathering data from different sources. For large corporations, the litigation discovery process frequently involves gathering data from a multitude of sources such as databases, individual custodians, web sources, tape backups, hardcopy documents, document repositories, emails, and/or other relevant sources. In addition, not only does the litigation discovery process for large corporations involve accessing a large number of sources, each of the accessed sources often yield a high volume of possibly relevant data as well.
Moreover, the data gathered frequently contain standard software application files (e.g., standard readme files, standard text files, and/or standard log files), which are not needed for data analysis, but cause the individual file sizes to be larger than needed and add to the overall data size inflation. In some instances, these standard software application files can take up 70% of the file size of the data gathered.
Consequently, the litigation discovery process for large corporations is often exceedingly time-consuming because it involves processing of a daunting amount of data. As a result, litigation discovery processes can be highly costly.